Entering The World of Audiophiles

I am a music lover period. I have been listening to music pretty much every day since I was a little child. When I say I listen I mean it. It's not just I turn on the radio or put on some music and plays in the background. No I literally sit down and listen to every little details. Every little sound, instruments, singers' voice and even taking breath.

I enjoy listening music this way, because when I listen to a song no matter how many times I heard it before I always discover something new, something interesting in it, that grabs my attention and I have the moment "wow I have never heard that sound before".

So who is an audiophile? An audiophile is a person who has a passion for high-quality sound reproduction, especially when it comes to music. Audiophiles often strive to achieve the highest level of fidelity and clarity in their audio systems, and may invest significant time and resources into selecting and optimizing their equipment, as well as acquiring high-quality recordings.

Thanks to todays technology music recorded on a CD is considered high quality, but if I take a step further I can access to a huge music library through streaming services such as Amazon HD, Tidal, Qobuz or Deezer. They offer even higher quality digital music, than CD quality.

Simply click on your favorite track and it plays. Amazing! But there is a problem. It does not sound very good through a laptop or a phone speaker. Sure you can connect your laptop or phone directly to a pair of speakers, but still not able to get the most out of it. So what do I mean by that?

In order to hear digital music we need to convert the digital signal to analogue to be able to hear what we want to play. Every device - laptop, phone, Ipad etc. has a built in DAC (digital to analogue converter), but the problem is with that is they are not designed to listen to music on a high quality level.

The good news is there is a solution for that and it is very simple. External DAC. You see when you connect your laptop to your speaker you most likely do it through the headphone output. The problem with that is the internal DAC of your device converts your digital signal to analogue to hear your music. Using an external DAC you bypass the internal DAC and instead of the headphone output you simply use the USB port so the digital signal will travel from your music source to the external DAC which then will be converted to analogue.

But wait I still cannot hear anything. That's correct. We still have to get that converted analogue signal out of the DAC to the headphones or speakers. To be able to do that we need a headphone amplifier with a headphone connected to it or a preamplifier connected to a power amplifier which then connected to the speakers. Confused yet?

I am not surprised. If you have never had separate hi-fi system this can be a little confusing, but once you understand what is going on and how it all works it is very simple. The good thing about it is that you can connect a turntable or a CD transporter to the system if you wish to do so. You are not limited only to digital streaming from streaming services.

Here is a short video explaining very well and easy to understand what it is all about.

Thank you for reading!